Romanian migration evolved from 1990 to become one of the biggest population movements in Europe. During the socialist era, international migration was relatively small, with only specific categories of people able to leave the country. Broadly speaking, these were ethnic migrants who left Romania legally, Romanians who travelled abroad legally (on the basis of labour contracts in Arab countries, for professional exchanges, family visits, etc.), and migrants who decided to cross Romania’s borders without permits. After escaping socialist Romania, many Romanian citizens applied for political asylum. In 1990, after forty years of controlled mobility, Romanians were at last allowed to exit the country freely. Romanian migration grew quickly, augmenting the previous population flow. In 2002, migration was enhanced by Romania’s visa-free agreement and in 2007 by the country’s accession to the EU, which extended the mobility rights of Romanian citizens. Recent migration has encompassed diverse patterns of temporary and permanent migration and return; it has included highly qualified and low-skilled migrants, people of disparate social and economic status, ‘brain drain’ emigrants, ethnic and labour migrants, petty traders and people from the margins of society. Due to this complexity and the considerable dynamism of population movements in the past twenty years, it is today difficult to provide a comprehensive study of Romanian migration and return. In this paper,1 we aim to examine some of the main patterns of return and migrant entrepreneurship. In the first part of the paper, we provide a brief analysis of Romanian migration, while in the second section we will deal with types of return practices discovered during our fieldwork over the past ten years. The paper relies on data gathered in five different locations in Romania: three small towns and two villages. We thus aim to reveal patterns that have rarely surfaced in studies of migration and return to Romania, highlighting the distinct significance of return migration and entrepreneurship for the regions and communities of origin
